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British-Australian academic said she suffered "psychological torture" while jailed in Iran and claims Tehran tried to recruit her as a spy, in her first interview since she was released last year. In comments aired by CNN-affiliate Sky News Australia on Tuesday, Kylie Moore-Gilbert also criticized the Australian government's attempts at using "quiet diplomacy" to free her.
Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, was held for two years from September 2018 after being arrested at a Tehran airport and accused of spying amid tensions between Iran and the United States.
She was found guilty of espionage in 2019 and sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released by Iran in November in an apparent prisoner exchange for three Iranians held overseas.
Moore-Gilbert told Sky News the first room she was held in was a "two meter by two meter box," with no toilet.
"I would say (it was) the extreme solitary confinement room, designed to break you. It's psychological torture," she said. "There were a few times in that early period that I felt broken, I felt if I have to endure another day of this, you know, if I could I'd just kill myself."
She said she was beaten up once by prison guards and forcibly injected with a tranquilizer against her will.
Moore-Gilbert said the allegations of her being a spy were "crazy." "There's no evidence of me being a spy for any country. Even the Revolutionary Guards couldn't work out which country I was supposedly spying for," she said in the interview.
